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A key tenet of geek culture is knowledge – we judge and are judged based on our encyclopedic knowledge of games, sci-fi, comics, anime, collectibles and more. But it’s impossible for one human being to know everything, no matter how many chips you get put in your brain. That’s where we come in. With this series of “Geeksplainers,” we’ll give you everything you need to know to get up to speed on some of the most complicated, intense subjects in the pop culture universe. No longer will you have to fake it in conversations until you have time to run to the bathroom and engage in a 45 minute Wikipedia session. Let us be your guide, now and forever.

This installment: Netflix’s new sci-fi show Altered Carbon looks like a breakthrough hit. Get up to speed on the cyberpunk novels that spawned it.

What is Altered Carbon?

Published in 2002, Altered Carbon is the first in a trilogy of novels by English author Richard K. Morgan. It takes place in the 26th century, where private investigator Takeshi Kovacs deals with the ramifications of technology that lets people upload their consciousness to new bodies or “sleeves.” In the first book, his consciousness is housed in the body of a policeman so he can investigate the death of a man named Laurens Bancroft, who can’t remember the 48 hours before he was killed. The journey takes him to some very dark places, melding classic detective fiction in the Raymond Chandler mode with gritty futurism. It won the Philip K. Dick Award for best science fiction novel in 2003.

Who Is Takeshi Kovacs?

One of the great antiheroes in modern sci-fi history, Kovacs is an amazing fulcrum to build this kind of story around. He used to be an “envoy,” a special class of personality designed to be beamed to distant places and kill people, and as such many of his moral and ethical safeguards have been surgically removed, lending him a penchant for extreme violence. These books are gory – one extended torture sequence ranks as one of the most intense things ever published. Kovacs’ personality has been dormant for a hundred years before the first book begins, lending him a fish out of water quality as well as he struggles to get acclimated to the shifting future.

So Why Wouldn’t You Just Live Forever

The thing with getting “re-sleeved” is that bodies don’t come cheap, especially young ones. Only the very wealthy can afford to have their minds put into new young bodies, and they’re called “Meths,” short for “Methuselahs.” They have their original bodies cloned and frozen until they’re ready to jump into a new one. It’s no secret that the aging process sort of sucks, and going through it over and over isn’t ideal, so the poorer folks often don’t re-sleeve after they die, or they wind up in low-quality android bodies or in a computer simulation without a body at all.

Why Is It So Good?

Morgan grabs the explicitly political nature of a dystopian future and squeezes it hard in these books. Things haven’t gotten much better for capitalism, and even though the technology is advanced it’s not used for the most ethical or humane of purposes. The trilogy takes the central conceit of detachable consciousness and moves it to some very interesting places. Not only can you be sleeved into a new body, but you can also be dumped into a virtual world instead – which leads to one of the book’s darkest and most disturbing scenes. Imagination is given full flower here, for better or for worse, and it’s full of incredible ideas that would translate great to the screen.

Who’s Behind The TV Show?

Screenwriter and producer Laeta Kalogridis optioned the book fifteen years ago for a TV series, but that was before the golden age of prestige television we find ourselves in. Kalogridis is probably best known for writing the English adaptation of Russian horror actioner Night Watch, as well as James Cameron’s upcoming Alita: Battle Angel. The first episode is directed by Miguel Sapochnik, who has lensed shows like Fringe and Game of Thrones. Starring as Takeshi Kovacs is Joel Kinnaman, no stranger to dystopian sci-fi from his turn in the recent Robocop remake. The first season is set to run ten episodes,and early screeners show that it’s not skimping on the hard R rating – it’s gory, sexual and intense.

Will Transplanting Consciousness Ever Be Possible?

We’re not sure, but that’s not stopping people from trying. By conservative estimate, the human brain’s 86 billion neurons would take at least 10 terabytes and as much as 2.5 petabytes of digital storage to replicate. And that’s just a straight-up digital comparison of one byte for each neuron in the organ. But simply putting together a list of these on-off switches probably won’t get your personality downloaded – the connections between these neurons is the tough part. Called the “connectome,” this has yet to be mapped by science. Many people are trying, though, including Russian millionaire Dmitry Itskov who has sunk his fortune into making consciousness transfer possible by 2045.